Student Blog: Life is a Cabaret: Putting on a Show

These past few weeks have been super crazy but I have gotten to do a lot of cool things, and one of them included helping put together a gender bent cabaret for the student organization I’m president of. Every year, Alpha Psi Omega puts on a gender bent cabaret called Bent, where students can take any song that they wouldn’t normally get the chance to sing and sing it! It is always so cool and fun to see what people come up with and this year was no exception to that. A lot goes into organizing an event like this, so I wanted to break down my role a little bit and what goes into organizing Bent!

First, I met a lot with the events coordinator for our organization and we ironed out details about parameters for acts, how many acts we were going to have and how we wanted to run auditions. How it went was we sent out a google form where folks could express interest in being in the cabaret by submitting a proposed act so we could get a feel for how many people were interested and what kinds of material we were looking at. From there, folks who were still interested submitted a 1 minute long video of their act as an audition. These were super fun to watch and definitely hard to narrow it down. We only really had room for 12 acts, so it was hard to pick which ones fit. We also wanted to find a variety, so it wasn’t just all slow ballads or all upbeat silly songs or two songs from the same show. We wanted a nice variety to have a full show.

Once we narrowed down the acts and decided the order of the cabaret, it was time for tech! We decided to do tech for the show the same day as the actual show to make things a little easier and since everyone was kind of doing their own thing and rehearsing their act on their own. For tech, we just had to iron out transitions and put everything together. To prepare for tech, I made a run sheet of the show and assigned people to move blocks and things like that. I also organized all the sound cues into a google drive so I could play them easily and I made sure we had everything we needed for tech. Then it was time! And that was probably one of the smoothest tech rehearsals I had ever seen in my life. We were done in an hour. Everyone was so great, and so on top of their transitions and it was great, we only had to run the show once. Then we were ready for the show!

The show itself went super well. We had a pretty full house and the audience was laughing and having fun and so were the performers. What I really loved about this year’s Bent is that we had dance majors and tech majors also perform and participate. I love when people get to show off their talents and get the opportunity to do this. Bent was a success and I’m so glad to have been apart of it.

I love getting to do things like this. I love organizing things, I love putting together cabarets and shows, I love it a lot. I like getting to see folks come out of their shell and get to perform. I love this life that I get the opportunity to live. Go support live theatre. And as always, go do great things.